you do realize it is quite common business practice to specify when something that is broken is sold.... Imagine buying a car with several engine problems you had no prior knowledge off..... (not in the personal sellers market)

Technically GOG does give the warning, at the bottom of the requirements "Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility". They should add 11 there now as well, but anyway, basically they said all along that if a game is listed as working on Win 10, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll work on all versions of it, updates may break compatibility at any time, no guarantees.

Take Conquest - Frontier Wars as another example

https://www.gog.com/en/game/conquest_frontier_wars

So, because the system requirements state "only Windows XP - 7 " this would mean that there is no guarantee given that it will work on a Windows 11 system, out of the box that is

At a fundamental level i'm guessing the op's problem is the same as mine since a clean install of the game does not boot on my W10 machine.

From there, when we set about "fixing it", we often throw a bunch of stuff in a pot, isolated community fixes, comprehensive community patches and, why not, some mods. And when we have a good enough recipe we kind of rely on it to work next time around. Only there's no guarantee it will work next time around, sometimes it doesn't, this time it didn't.

I can fit a whole lot under the frustration umbrella, just not everything. It rubs me the wrong way to see someone who, gaming wise, clearly benefited from a preservation rational to suddenly propose summary removal on the grounds that "it's not working".

Regardless, the op moved past it and can once again run the game, in spite of everything else, for me, that's a win.

Do you think there's perhaps a reason as to why when we have a busted car we spend obscene amounts of money in replacement parts and in the expertise required for diagnosis and assembly instead of just downloading, free of charge, a fix for the engine from the internet cobbled together by owners of same make/model car and then simply throw everything at the "car's folder" ?

I don't know about you but for me that reason seems like a good enough reason to not try to establish that kind of parallel.

I guess we can't get tied to the notion, that buying a game from GOG means it will work out-of-the-box for all time. And that's just logical really.

I suppose we can get upset that a newly bought game from GOG doesn't work on latest OS, but personally just being able to buy an old game is a wonderful thing. Most of the time, we can get around issues by tweaking, often with help from others.

I tend to see Game Preservation as being about the possibility of getting a game in the first place, or having a copy that isn't neutered by DRM, and of course having it backed up independent of a game provider or store ... usually that means locally, at home.

I understand your sentiment.
But personally, I wouldn't like such an all or nothing approach at all, as I've had several older games that ran miserably under Win10, but were perfectly fine in Wine on Linux.
Just because changes from Microsoft break backwards compatibility, I'd be sad if that meant I could no longer easily get hold of classic games that run just fine on modern non-Windows systems.

A prominent compatibility warning on the game's store page would seem sensible to me, though.

I like how op was like the Steam version of Gothic didn't work no biggie :) but then ranted about the Gog version, which did. Disingenuous but alright

Yea, well, uhm ... let's zoom out a bit then and see games again as a product. I'm sure my reasoning fits better that way

I actually value backwards compatibility a lot more than being able to run my games on the latest version of Windows, because:

1. I still have most of my previous primary gaming computers in more or less working condition
2. Games don't get to vote for when should I start to use a new version of Windows ever again after I installed Win98SE over my DOS 6.22 / Linux setup just be able to play Ultima "IX" Ascension...
3. If a Windows 10/11 compatibility improving update for a game doesn't bring anything else on the table, why would I wish to deal with any potential new compatibility issues it may cause under Linux when the last Windows 7 compatible version is already known to run under Linux just fine?

In fact I would prefer if developers would just move on to make a new game once they feel that they need to start dropping existing older OS compatibility, at the very least once an update no longer works on one of operating systems a game was claimed to run when it was released here, the previous version should be added as an unsupported extra, because some of us can't keep up with the update cycles of over a dozen hundred games in our collection and obviously even if we could, that only solves the problem with games that we managed to buy before they received any older OS compatibility breaking updates.

Sure, if I was looking for a tasty meal, I would be annoyed if I got a raw steak and uncooked vegetables, but here I am more like trying to find new additions to my collection of old pieces of art that sometimes may require more or less effort from me to restore them to their pristine condition.

Fixed

The problem here is that the game in question (Gothic/Gothic 2) does actually work out of the box in Windows 11. At least on some (relatively standard) hardware configurations. For some reason, it didn't work on OP's - and he didn't seem to report it to support or provide relevant information so it's impossible to ascertain why.

If a game didn't work on ANY supported version of Windows on any hardware configuration, I could see your argument to not selling it as windows compatible - although in theory you could still sell it as Linux compatible and offer the windows executables, or sell it "as is" and caveat emptor.

However, in this case, a quirk of OP's setup (and of Namur's) seems to mean that they can't run it out of the box on their Windows 10 installs.

In this circumstance, the correct approach would be to contact support. Depending on purchase time (or play time if logged using Galaxy), refunds may or may not be appropriate if support can't help. For OP, as he has clearly played the game using the GoG install for quite some time, a refund wouldn't be appropriate.

Deserves fixing or a remaster. I suggested it to Jordan ZoomPlatform a few years back, but the rightsholders had no interest iirc.

a shame, do you happen to know how to run the game? Before dgvoodoo would help but that does not work atm

edit:

on the forum page are solutions available, the game runs again like its 1995

I think that's the issue right here. Right now, the"About" section of GOG's homepage says: "Even if the game is older than you are, we test it thoroughly, fix all the bugs, and apply patches so it runs flawlessly on your next-gen PC and on modern OSs."

If they don't have the resources or the will to make sure that message is actually accurate, they need to stop advertising their service like this. You can't have it both ways and expect people to be happy.

Sure, but who's job is it to fix that small issue when they seem to be missing a few critical roles?